From 1926 to 1935 the bodies of those sentenced to be shot by the OGPU-NKVD and of those who died in Moscow prisons were secretly buried in the Vagankovskoe graveyard. This is confirmed by documents from the investigation files preserved at the FSB central archive and in the archives of the FSB departments for Moscow and the Moscow Region.
The graveyard has not been investigated and the exact number of those secretly buried there has not been established. In 1995, the Memorial Society first published a list of 733 names, which has since been enlarged and the entries expanded. In 1994 a memorial was placed next to the entrance to the graveyard: “To the victims of political repression, 1927-1937”.
A ten-volume Book of Remembrance was published for the city of Moscow and its victims: one each for the Vagankovskoe Cemetery (1995), the Kommunarka “special site” (2000) and the Donskoe Monastery (2005); and seven volumes for the Butovo Firing Range (1997-2003). Together they provided biographical entries on 31,900 who were shot or sent to the camps; this total included brief notes on 5,590 victims of political repression who had not been formally rehabilitated.
The Memorial online database (2025) includes 22,429 victims in the city of Moscow (and 20,527 buried at Butovo). See the Kommunarka “special site”.
11,253 were shot. Most were executed during the Great Terror (8,252), but almost two thousand more were shot (1,788) in 1939-1942. The database names 32 shot between 1926 and 1935: six were buried at the Vagankovskoe cemetery and four of the five executed in 1935 at the Donskoe Monastery. Charges were dropped against 254 individuals, of whom 15 died in captivity, two in Butyrka Prison. (753 are recorded as dying in the camps or the special settlements.)
| Date | Nature of ceremonies | Organiser or responsible person | Participants | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
30 October
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Solemn ceremonies to mark Remembrance Day for the Victims of Political Repression
|
nk
|
nk
|
nk
|
| State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
|---|---|---|
|
Not preserved
|
Not defined
|
Unmarked
|
[ original texts and hyperlinks ]
Lists of those shot in Moscow 1937-1952. Issue 2: The Vagankovskoe cemetery, 1926-1936, FSK and the Memorial society, Moscow, 1995 (303 pp)
Recollections of Lawlessness: A database “A Martyrology of the Victims of Political Repression, Shot and Buried in Moscow and the Moscow Region in 1918-1953” Sakharov Centre [retrieved, 19 January 2025]
“Vagankovskoe graveyard. Burials of the executed and prison dead”, Virtual Museum of the Gulag [partially retrieved, 3 June 2022; no longer accessible]
